Adolescent Treatment For Girls

I was thinking today about how when I was younger, I was obsessed with reading the stories of struggling girls in the back of Seventeen magazine, or through the messed-up-teens-help-books my mom got. I didn’t read them to identify; I read them for inspiration. I remember a particular article about a teenage anorexic that made me feel especially competitive. “That girl got down to 80 pounds? I’m only at 89? I have to get skinnier!” I learned new tricks and techniques, and each article or book I read pushed me closer to my disorders- not to recovery. From those articles, I felt like my self injury, eating disorder and drug use were all somehow validated. I had it in my head that the girls in the articles had gotten bad enough to deserve attention and to deserve help. When I had begun to feel like I could no longer carry on doing what I was doing, I resisted asking for help because I wasn’t as bad as the kids in the articles. I didn’t weigh 80 pounds, I weighed 89. I hadn’t gotten stitches, but I couldn’t stop cutting myself. I wasn’t a teenage runaway on heroin and crack, but my drug problem was getting me into trouble at school. I felt like in order to get help, I needed to be worse off.
Fortunately, the people around me thought that I was deserving of help and recovery. At Visions Adolescent Treatment Center, I was able to receive help for all aspects of my disordered thinking. I worked on the core issues that had blossomed into my self injury, eating disorder, and drug abuse. I met other teens like me, and learned not to compare myself to anyone. The most important thing I think I learned there was that everyone’s story is different, and that it doesn’t matter how bad it got for me. The only thing that matters is a desire to get better. Everyone is deserving of a chance at recovery, and I’m so glad I took mine. Click here for adolescent treatment for girls.

Michael Jackson Dies From Cardiac Arrest

Michael Jackson passed away this afternoon in LA after suffering a cardiac arrest. You have to wonder what led to this tragic end for the King of Pop. I know that his weight has dropped dramatically over the last few years and because of his enormous sense of privacy, one can only speculate what could have happened. Poor Michael Jackson. I know that many things can lead to cardiac arrest. It is one of the biggest risk factors of the two things that plagued my own young life: drug abuse and eating disorders.

Perhaps it’s unfair or too cynical to conclude that Jackson’s end may have been the final result of a lifestyle of damaging weight loss and/or drug abuse, but celebrity deaths can sometimes help to bring attention to the huge risks that lie in dangerous lifestyles. His repeated cosmetic surgeries make me wonder how unhappy he might have been with himself. I hope that Jackson’s death wasn’t the end result of an eating disorder or drug abuse. That would mean he had been miserable for years, and I pity anyone- celebrity or not- who has to endure that kind of pain. I hope that his kids will be okay, and that his family can have some peace. Rest in peace Michael.

Stop to look at the man in the mirror, make sure you like who you see.

If not, do something about it.

Shakespeare = Sober (kinda, sorta… not really.)

Shakespeare = Sober (kinda, sorta… not really.)


I was a freshman in high school when I was given an assignment to read and analyze a lengthy poem by William Shakespeare. The poem, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ is almost 1900 lines long and, in Shakespearian form, very hard to follow for a fourteen year old brain under the influence of anything I could get my hands on. I never read the poem. I failed the class and many others that followed. It was only after I got sober almost a decade later that I discovered a passage in that same poem that has helped me maintain perspective in my own continuous recovery from the disease of more.
I was crawling through my first year of sobriety and knee deep in my guilt reading phase. I decided to read all of the books that I was supposed to read as a way to make some amends to myself. It is an endeavor that I continue still, and through which I have gained a great deal. When I rediscovered ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ I struggled through it, but was able to take with me the following:

What win I if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy?
Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?
Or what fond begger, but to touch the crown,
Would with the scepter straight be stricken down?

I get a lot out of those seven lines. There are more times than I like to admit that drinking and using drugs sounds like a great idea. There are those times when I don’t want to go to meetings, or call my sponsor, or be of service. Those are also the times when I can open my wallet and read that part of the poem, take a deep breath, and keep walking. “What win I if I gain the thing I seek?” What will getting loaded avail me? At the very least it is a hangover. At most it would cost me my life. “A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy?” Mere moments of the ease and comfort that comes with that first drink, and the spiral that surly will follow. “Who buys a minutes mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? Who in their right mind would give up four and a half years of recovery and immeasurable progress for just ‘one more time’? Today I have the opportunity to make the right choice. One day at a time, I hope to continue making the right choice.

Brian C.-
Visions Teen Drug treatment Center

Household Inhalants

Teresa Roy
1/17/08
Blog

Household Inhalants

Abuse of common household products, often called “huffing” or inhalant abuse, is common among teens (healthatoz.com). The abuse of household inhalants is as common as marijuana with young people.

Paint thinner, liquid paper, spray paint, house cleaners, glue and solvents are more accessible and less expensive. There are more than 1,000 products that are dangerous when inhaled. Some suggestions from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, University of Michigan Health System and the AAP on what to look for if you suspect your child of “huffing” are: odors of the inhalant on clothing or breath, spots or sores around their mouth, loss of appetite and weight loss, poor performance in school, changes in behavior, unusual number of bottles or cans in his/her bedroom, or in unusual places.